What Your Agency Needs to do to Compete Digitally, with Duane Melius

Episode 119:

Duane Melius has worked eight years in journalism, social enterprise, and media production in London and over six years across Southeast Asia in a digital agency environment. He’s previously had clients in banking, automotive, food & hospitality, FMCG, entertainment, and more, and those clients have been both B2B and B2C. He has millions of dollars of Digital campaign experience. Duane specializes in growing teams that use digital channels to reach niche and mass audiences with ROI-enabled campaigns, activities, and retainers.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

The challenges traditional agencies are facing in going digital

Why you need to use digital in your personal life to be able to sell it (and why your team needs to do the same to create great digital content)

The importance of mastering the area of digital your agency has as its core competency while keeping familiar with other areas

Staying on top of what’s new in digital

Qualities that make for great digital employees

Using reporting to show your clients how your digital efforts are improving

Ways to interview for new digital skillsets that you don’t have inside your agency yet

Using a multi-step approval process to make sure mistakes don’t get made with digital content

Making the content approval process easier on clients — especially when there is compliance involved

The good and the bad of digital tools (and why there’s often more bad than good, especially with social media)

Why clients might start to take their social media in-house and what agencies can do to stay invaluable

Ways to contact Duane Melius:

For almost 30 years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies and then started his own (which he still owns and run) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads Agency Management Institute, which advises hundred of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.